There were hands everywhere - raised toward the sky or, if you want to put it that way, toward heaven. While Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were fighting about who is going to be the next president of the United States, 10,000 people had come on behalf of the Christian Coalition for America to Philadelphia in the last weekend of September to pray for their country to free itself from sin. The preacher onstage shouted: "This country belongs to Jesus." And he added, shouting even louder: "Let's not be Americans first, let's be Christians first."

As a German, I have always been fascinated by the fact that immigrants who come to America say almost immediately after their arrival: "I'm an American." However, this summer, while I was on a journalism fellowship with the Philadelphia Inquirer, I realized that many whose families have lived in the United States for generations don't necessarily regard themselves as Americans first. More often, they identify as Republicans or Democrats, as evangelical Christians or representatives of secularism, as antiabortion or pro-choice activists.

I was stunned that the nation has become even more divided than when President George W. Bush was running for his second term. At that time, I was studying at American University in Washington, D.C. There a group of American and international students often discussed politics in a dorm room all night - after we had smuggled beer onto the campus, where alcohol was forbidden.

Illicit beer runs weren't the only bipartisan effort. While differences among members of the group were more than obvious, liberal students admitted that their favorite politicians had voted for the war in Iraq that they so resented. Young conservatives acknowledged that they didn't fundamentally object to same-sex marriage. The common ground was respect for the other person and for his or her opinion.

That was a different America from the one I got to know when the Philadelphia Inquirer sent me to cover a Fire Obama campaign of a local Tea Party at the beginning of September.

I won't even go into how some Tea Party members obviously didn't feel comfortable talking to a supposed "European socialist" like me. However, the reporting assignment resulted in some interesting experiences because my cell phone number was published with the article, a common practice at the newspaper.

First I received many calls from conservatives who desperately wanted to send me money to support the anti-Obama effort. They didn't realize that I was just the reporter, not a member of the group. But that was just the start.

Three days after the article appeared, my cell phone rang at 4 a.m.

"Is that Tobias Peter?" the soft but determined female voice asked. When I said, yes, she said: "Those Tea Party people you are writing about, you shouldn't do that. They are bad."

I was still sleepy, which helped me to remain relatively calm: "I'm a reporter. It's my job to talk to them. Why on earth are you calling me at 4 o'clock in the morning?"

She answered, raising her voice: "Well, you need to know they are really bad people."

She couldn't have told me that a little bit later in the day?

"Why? Did I wake you up or anything like that?" she asked, chuckling.

Let's just say that call was a very special experience of American partisanship - different from, but in a way still similar to, the one with the Christian Coalition for America.

At that event, I was wearing my baseball cap, standing in the middle of all those praying hands on Independence Mall in Philadelphia.

Why did I go there? I wanted to get to know every inch of America and all of its faces. But while people were talking about love, what many of them seemed to mean was hatred for gays and others who were different from them. A man took my hand to pray together with me. I pulled it back slowly - but resolutely.

"Hey, we are praying for our country," he objected.

"I'm not from here," I answered.

"I love this country," I think to myself while I'm leaving the mall. "But this isn't my America."

Tobias Peter is a political reporter for the Stadt-Anzeiger in Cologne, Germany. He was a 2012 Arthur F. Burns fellow, which brings German journalists to the United States and U.S. journalists to Germany for a two-month exchange. Send your feedback to us through our online form at sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1